Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Wow, I feel like a crappy food blogger. If you read any other food blogs besides mine, you will notice that bloggers are preparing you for the big feast on Thursday. They are showing tutorials for pies and turkeys. They are giving you ideas for jazzing up your vegetable side dishes. And filling your head with ideas for what you can do with all your leftovers. Well, not me. I suck. Sorry dear readers. I have let you down. I hope your Thanksgiving doesn't suck because of me:)

Anyways, onto the food that has nothing to do with Thanksgiving.

Do you ever watch "Chopped" on Food Network? Four chefs are given a basket of ingredients and have only 30 or so minutes to turn then into a plate of food. Usually, the ingredients are super weird. Like make a dessert from broccoli, ground turkey and a football - or something like that. In one episode, their ingredients included chorizo and pineapple and I loved that idea. So I put together a dish with those things along with black beans, diced tomatoes and rice. I thought that chorizo and pineapple were a brilliant pairing because the sweetness of the pineapple can play off the spicy smokiness of the chorizo. It turned out to do just that.

This dish is very quick to put together. Cook the rice while you cook the chorizo mixture. Besides coming together quickly, it is super satisfying with the whole rice-and-gooey-delicious-comfort-food thing going on.

In a large pan over medium high heat, add olive oil. Once the oil runs quickly in the pan, add the onion, red bell pepper, garlic, chorizo and salt. Saute, breaking up the chorizo with a wooden spoon, until onion is softened, about 5 minutes. Stir in black beans and diced tomatoes. Stir and cook for an additional 5 minutes, until tomato juices are evaporated. Remove pan from heat and stir in pineapple.

Serve chorizo mixture over rice and sprinkle fresh cilantro on top.

Rookie's Notes: You will notice that there aren't any added seasonings in this. I thought the chorizo's flavor would be enough, and it was. So plan on extracting a lot of flavor from the chorizo to season your dish.

I diced my whole pineapple and it yielded about three cups of pineapple. If you want, add all three cups of the pineapple instead of just two. Or just feed the rest to your 18 month old who loves pineapple:)

Do you have any beans and rice dishes that are vegetarian? I need a good beans and rice dish that I can pull together quickly as a good stand-by (is that the right word?... you know what I mean right?) for my little vegetarian family. I've searched all over the web and you would be surprised... you'd think beans and rice... pretty simple... but I have not been able to find "the one." yet :(

Rookie darling, I wish you could be with me right now for I have had some amazing dishes. Dishes you and me could talk about and you could figure out how to make them and I'll be your preppy prep cook.

This place provides food inspiration because it's all so different. Like for dessert today we had carrot peelings that were sauted in butte and something sweet. There was some other stuff with kick too.

Wow. The amberiem just kicked in and I better post this before my face hits the keyboard or I say something more embarrassing that the standard level of embarrassment.